


Edge of the Atlantic

by Vongchild



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: F/M, Family, Post-Movie, Press Tour, Semi-shippy, sibling dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-07
Updated: 2013-08-07
Packaged: 2017-12-22 18:10:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,361
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/916409
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vongchild/pseuds/Vongchild
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jazmine Becket only wants to talk to her brother now that he's made something of himself. Raleigh's not sure he likes the person his little sister's grown up to be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Edge of the Atlantic

**Author's Note:**

> I solemnly swear that Jazmine Becket is an actual character from the novelization and not just a poorly-named OC. 
> 
> I want to have a serious conversation someday about the ecological impact of the Kaiju war.

 

Question: When does Jazmine Becket stop talking to her brothers?

Short Answer: At their mother’s funeral.

Long Answer: When she marries a banker, moves to Westchester, becomes convinced she’s better than them, and starts pretending that her name isn’t spelled with a goddamn Z.

\---

Raleigh gets the call as soon as he and Mako land in Boston – a breathless _oh god I’ve been trying to reach you for hours_ , after years of radio silence and he’s like – “What the fuck, Jazz?” There is a time and place for this conversation and it is not while he and Mako wait for their bags in the C terminal of Logan International.

Jazmine says, “I heard you were on the East Coast. You should come see us. In Westchester. I’ll text you the address. We’ll have dinner. The boys would love to meet you.”

“The boys?” asks Raleigh, gesturing frantically to Mako as their bags zip by on the carousel.

“They’re three and eighteen months,” says Jazmine. “See you soon.” She hangs up. Raleigh sighs. So. There’s that. Mako hands him his suitcase.

“Is there a problem?” she asks.

Raleigh shrugs at her. There’s a car waiting out front that they need to go meet and he wants to get moving. “Nothing,” he says. She raises an eyebrow. “My sister,” he says. Mako nods, because, well, she knows.

\---

Jazmine hugs Raleigh like they’ve never been apart. She hugs Mako, too, and Raleigh feels an odd surge of protectiveness when he sees his co-pilot’s shoulders tense up. Mako _knows_ , he thinks. She _knows_ that Jazmine hasn’t spoken to him since their mother’s funeral, that she never even tried to contact him when Yancy died. She knows what Jazmine looked like in her too-old black dress and too-scuffed heels and drugstore peroxide, knows that doesn’t match Jazmine now in her smart cardigan and her fitted jeans and her riding boots and her hair which is lighter than it should be but looks real and looks _expensive_ the way a girl growing up on the Alaskan coast in the Kaiju war could never afford.

Jazmine says to Mako, “How lovely to finally meet you,” and Raleigh searches her voice for anything that might suggest that his sister has _not_ been replaced by an Alien Pod Person.

Mako replies, “I’ve heard a lot about you.” Which is true, in a way.

Jazmine ushers them inside. There is a small boy playing on the carpet in the living room, jaeger in one hand and kaiju in the other, smashing them together. When he looks up and sees Mako and Raleigh beside his mother, his eyes go wide and he drops the toys. Then he hides behind the arm of the couch.

“He’s shy,” laughs Jazmine.

Raleigh looks at the action figures, recognizes the sleek, Anime-inspired lines of Tacit Ronin and he remembers that jaegers never really die, they just get repackaged as commemorative anniversary editions. The kaiju figure is something out of his nightmares, dark flesh streaked with lightning and the face that gave it its name – _Knifehead_. He picks up the toy. “You know this is the thing that killed Yancy?” he asks.

Jazmine looks over at him and shakes her head. “Oh, no,” she says. “I hadn’t realized.” The little boy peers at Raleigh, eyes like saucers. Jazmine ruffles his sandy hair. “It’s his favorite.”

Her husband comes downstairs, announces that everything is squared away with the sitter and they had better get on the road to make it to their dinner reservations. He stands a solid four inches taller than Raleigh, trim and tailored and with a passing resemblance, Raleigh thinks, to John F. Kennedy. When he speaks, it becomes uncanny – Bostonian accent, politician’s cadence. He works in finance, drives an all-electric Chevrolet from next year, calls Jazmine his trophy wife and is only sort of joking about it.

Raleigh hates him right off the bat.

“You’re going to love this place,” says Mr. Perfect, as he drives his stupid extravagant car seventy miles per hour in a fifty-five zone. “Freshest seafood in the tri-state area. Nothing terribly _exotic_ , I’m afraid, but…”

It’s a kaiju joke, and Mako and Raleigh both pretend not to get it. Mr. Perfect asks Raleigh a stupid question, the same kind he’s been getting and answering for reporters for the last two weeks and Raleigh answers it in as few words as possible and glances at Mako, sees her seething like _what, she wasn’t there?_ His knuckles itch. Her knuckles itch. She reaches across the middle seat and takes his hand in hers and they sit there together, knuckles itching and thumbs rubbing and-

Jazmine adjusts her mirror. Maybe she sees them sitting like that. Maybe she misinterprets the gesture. Maybe she smiles at them.

In New York, they still eat _oyster_. Eating oysters in the Pacific is like eating a mouthful of kaiju blue.

\---

Raleigh and Mako make the united decision to cut the evening short. In the morning, they have to smile and wave to the crowd on The Today Show. That goes well, until the anchor pulls up a photograph of Mako in a ruined blue coat and one red shoe and asks her about Tokyo’s Daughter. Mako gives him a steely look and says, “With all due respect,” which means _none at all_ , “Two weeks ago we closed a portal that was letting monsters the size of One World Trade Center into the Pacific Ocean. Tokyo was ten years ago and I don’t want to talk about it.”

After the taping wraps, Raleigh has ten missed calls and another incoming. “Jazz?”

“You should come down to Coney Island. I’m down there with the boys right now,” she says.

Raleigh and Mako leave through the stage door onto the street. It’s getting to be late January and Rockefeller Center looks sort of dismal. It’s beginning to snow. “I know it’s the off-season, but – get on the downtown F train and meet us out here. It’ll be fun,” Jazmine assures him, and hangs up in that maddening way she has.

“What do you think?” Raleigh asks Mako. “Should we meet up with them?”

“She’s your sister,” she says evasively. And – they have the time to kill.

Jazmine meets them on the boardwalk outside the aquarium entrance, one son balanced on her hip and the other tugging on her arm and shrieking that he wants to go down on the beach. It’s blustery, and the snow’s not sticking but that doesn’t mean it’s stopping. Once they’re on the sand, the little boy breaks away from Jazmine and runs across the beach. “Don’t go into the water!” she calls, and he stops right at the tide line, staring eagerly out.

“We come here in the summer,” Jazmine explains to Raleigh and Mako, and they follow her older son across the beach. The smaller one is nodding in and out of sleep against her chest. “It’s packed then. They love it.”

Raleigh stands quietly beside Mako on the edge of the Atlantic. She looks, sees the murky water, sees the glass washed up on the beach, sees the clouds overhead and the boy running in and out of the waves who has never known jaegers and kaiju as anything more than toys to be played with. Her knuckles itch. Raleigh’s knuckles itch. Their fingers find each other.

“I don’t like it,” says Mako. “Any of it.”

Raleigh checks his watch without actually checking it. He says, “We’d better be heading back, Jazz.”

\---

Their handler from the press tour finds them later, drinking tea in the hotel lounge and watching the snow fall more heavily in Times Square. “Your sister called,” she says to Raleigh. “Because you weren’t answering your phone.”

Raleigh nods. And then he looks back towards the windows, and Mako scoots a little closer.

“What should I do?” asks their handler.

“Tell her I’m unavailable,” says Raleigh. Mako leans her head against Raleigh’s collarbone. Outside, the snow and the lights swirl together into a wild kaleidoscope.

“I want to go back west,” Raleigh says to her. Mako nods and sips her tea.

“Me too,” she says, listening to his pulse. 

 

 


End file.
